They should just be accepted as a cost of freedom and rejected as a highly improbable occurrence.

In addition, the U.S. gov't should stop oppressing people both at home and abroad. If they spent as much time looking after the interests of the average citizen and the common good of all Americans, and not just the wealthiest, most influential in the top one tenth of one percent of the population, we would not be the target of terrorist attacks.

It's very simple. Issue certificates to your users. Only let them into your site if their browser presents certificates signed by you. You can use fields in the certifcate to identify the user of your site.

Certificate management isn't that hard. Most private keys are protected by passwords, but still, I think it is a damned sight better than just username/password.

In my experience, humans have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and the intelligence of our species. I specialize in automating "knowledge tasks." The people that I work with are very often surprised at just how much of what they think of as requiring human intelligence can actually be broken down into algorithms that are then applied to the data. Very little of what people actually do on a daily basis is more than the algorithmic application of knowledge.

I agree that there are some things computers cannot do just yet. Those jobs requiring creativity for instance. You could program a computer to imitate Picasso or a certain writer, but I doubt we'll be seeing computers creating truly original works of art or literature in the near future.

I used to do this: running everything in blackbox window manager with different panels and other launcher applications. I actually stuck with blackbox for a long time because I liked being able to edit the desktop window in a text file and open applications just by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing from a menu. I gave up on using other launchers and panel applications. I really liked the minimalism of black box.

Now, I'm using Unity with the Launcher on Ubuntu. I find it usable for the most part, and once you alter habits to work with its paradigm, it doesn't really hinder productivity.

This is exactly the type of abuse of power that the Second Amendment is meant to prevent. When any and all citizens could be armed, the government agents have to deal with them as equals or risk being killed. When all of the risk is on the unarmed populace, the thugs are free to act with impunity.

Why would you want more nuclear power? There is only so much uranium to be mined. It really doesn't matter how long estimates say the uranium reserves will last, there is still only so much to be had, and then what? Eventually, we'll run out of uranium, just as we'll eventually run out of oil and coal. Sure, we'll have more some day, if you care to wait millions or billions of years. Frankly, I don't have the time.

The best source of power beats us on the head every day, the Sun. We should be seriously investing in solar, wind, and tidal for power generation. These sources are not likely to run out for the lifetime of the planet, and that's a damned site better than relying on finite resources that take millions of years to replenish.

NOTE: There are more ways to use solar power than just photovoltaic cells.

No. G-S are not "trying to be good guys." They are trying to make money in a scam investment in a way that is illegal in the U.S. They are obeying U.S. law to avoid being sued or whatever. This is purely a cover-your-ass move.

I'm going to do the same thing about it that we do about the 40,000 odd traffic fatalities every year: Nearly nothing.

We don't invade privacy and remove freedoms because so many people die in traffic accidents. Why should we because of some vague "terrorist" threat? Honestly, airport security never has and never will stop a determined terrorist. We need to simply have an adult conversation with the American people and perhaps increase the educational investment in mathematics education. Perhaps, if they understood statistics a bit better, then they wouldn't run around like idiots demanding that something be DONE about what amounts to a non-threat.

You know, everyone keeps quoting "information wants to be free" out of context. Stewart Brand also said in the same breath that information wants to be expensive. He was talking about two sides of the equation, the consumer side that wants to be free, and the producer side, that wants to be expensive.

I personally get very tired of the producer/consumer economic model that keeps getting shoved down our throats by the old economic models and the industries that cling to them.

The Internet and affordable technology enable us all to be producers and consumers of each others' digital works. The whole tired argument of information wants to be free/information wants to be expensive should really be a moot point by now.